KITCHEN SINK
The best of Richard Till's columns 
from the Sunday Star Times
Richard Till
Renaissance Publishing - $26.99  
PUBLICATION DATE MONDAY 19 APRIL 2010

Richard Till has always been a strong advocate for the preservation of our culinary history.  His thoughtful columns, which have appeared in the Sunday Star-Times since 2008, are more often that not dedicated to honouring Kiwi traditions, especially the strong links between food and community.

KITCHEN SINK  features a collection of around 70 of these columns, most of which finish with a recipe so that as well as offering informative and entertaining reading, there’s also the potential for you to don your favourite pinny, roll up your sleeves and let loose your Kiwi-style inner cook.

Alkthough I read  Richard Till's columns in the Sunday Star Times each week I have gained  huge pleasure  from re-reading them in book format. His happy, relaxed, entertaining and accessible writing style makes them a delight. Add to the mix all the practical and mainly easy-to-make recipes , the appealing interior design and black & white illustrations by Trevor Newman and you have a cracker of a book. A perfect gift for the men in your life. Or the women for that matter.

Over recent years Richard Till’s pleasure in cooking, talking and writing about good old-fashioned Kiwi tucker, the kind of food that so many of us grew up with, has resulted in two series of Kiwi Kitchen (the popular television programme), a best-selling book based on that programme,(now back in print in time for Mothers" Day and lying at #5 on the NZ best-seller list), and in October 2009 a second book, Richard Till Makes It Easy.

The publishers have kindly allowed me to reproduce a couple of the recipes from Kitchen Sink along with one of the columns which will give you a feel for his style.

Earthly delights
Labour Weekend has come and gone and I haven’t planted out the tomatoes. This unprecedented state of affairs has come about because southerlies, rain and hail, with snow to low levels, have been sweeping across the South Island. The nice folk at the weather forecasting service suggested this weather has ramped up the risk of frost as the southerlies ease and that we home gardeners would be well advised to delay the planting of tender seedlings.

I’ve grown the tomatoes from seed this year, a first for me, so I was very much inclined to act on their recommendation and the plants still sit in their pots shuffling from the kitchen table to the back step in the mornings and back inside at night. I’d have normally planted the potatoes for Christmas dinner on Labour Day, too but as part of what now seems like a theme of disturbed gardening habits, I planted them three weeks ago. Not a carefully considered variation, it was no more than me hungrily looking forward so much to eating the first new potato of the year that I absentmindedly planted them early.
Eating a new potato is more a textural experience than a flavour one. The delight is in the firm bite of the waxy-fleshed new potato and also for me the experience of brushing off its thin papery skin with an old nailbrush under the running tap. The very best, just-dug new potatoes have skin so loosely attached you can almost blow it off. The much-admired waxy texture is a result of the starch not being fully mature and because of this some consider the new potato an unripe fruit and say it’s too demanding on the digestion to serve to young children or invalids.

I’m very pleased my mother never got wind of that piece of advice. No matter how many new potatoes I cook, they all seem to get eaten. Unreasonably large numbers of them get wolfed down in a sitting. A couple of scalding hot ones will be picked out of the bowl and eaten as it’s carried to the table, everyone will eat two or three helpings during the meal, and then, if any still remain, whoever is stacking the dishwasher will probably gnaw on another two or three as they do the tidying up. Because of this shrinkage I hid 10 of them before I put them in the serving dish at yesterday’s dinner, to make sure I could have some cold ones today.
There is nothing nicer than a cold new potato with a little blob of Highlander mayonnaise for lunch, or a little plate of crisply fried slices, well salted of course. In the increasingly season-less world of airfreighted and heated glasshouse produce they are a true seasonal treat.

 Best potato salad
1kg potatoes (roughly)

Dressing
1 medium red onion
1 clove garlic
1/3 C stuffed green olives, diced
1 T capers
2 gherkins
1 T (heaped) Dijon mustard
finely chopped fresh herbs  (mint is nice)
1/4 C oil
3 T cider vinegar
1 t salt

Finely chop the onion and garlic. Roughly chop the stuffed green olives, capers and gherkins and put in a bowl. Add mustard and finely chopped mint, oil, vinegar and salt and stir to combine. Cook the potatoes, strain and, when cool enough to handle, cube the potatoes and put in a large bowl. Stir in the dressing to combine. Great warm or cold.

Eating a new potato is more a textural experience than a flavour one. The delight is in the firm bite of the waxy-fleshed new potato and also for me the experience of brushing off its thin papery skin with an old nailbrush under the running tap. The very best, just-dug new potatoes have skin so loosely attached you can almost blow it off.

Richard Till’s Dressed Pie

Filling
2 onions, finely chopped
2 carrots, grated
500g mince
salt and pepper
flour

Topping
6 potatoes, peeled and boiled
2 T butter
1/4 C milk
1 egg, beaten
salt and white pepper
2 cups frozen peas, boiled in salted water for 30 minutes and drained
canned slices of beetroot

Line well greased individual pie tins with savoury short pastry. Brown onion and carrot, add mince and brown. Season carefully with salt and pepper and thicken with a little flour, depending on how runny the mince is. Make in advance and cool before filling pastry.
To make the topping, mash the hot potatoes with milk, butter, salt and pepper and when almost cool add the egg and combine well. Fill pastry with cold mince. Cover tops with mashed potato. Bake in a 170º oven for 45 minutes. Remove from oven, break crust with spoon and force peas into the potato along with a slice of beetroot. Look at what you are doing and make it beautiful. Serve set in a ladleful of packet gravy if you are so inclined.

About the author

Richard Till grew up in the South Island.  In 1988 he was the first to open a restaurant, Espresso 124, on what was to become Christchurch’s ‘strip’, today lined with many popular cafes and bars.  After Espresso 124, he went on to establish the Worcester Street Dining Room but these days, when he’s not on television or writing about food or performing his own comic cooking shows, Richard is the technical director and designer at the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury.